Baroque 'N' Roll

 I did not imagine that I was the first person to come up with "baroque 'n' roll" -   - the title of the chapter in S+A about Queen, Sparks, Cockney Rebel etc - indeed it seems like the kind of slightly unwieldly punnage that would be hatched within the UK rock press at some point prior, possibly by a headline writer.

Still, surprised to see that Brigid Brophy came up with it independently and quite early with the title of this 1987 collection of her essays. 

Apparently she was obsessed with the baroque aesthetic, it informed her own writing:

In Baroque-‘n’-Roll and Other Essays, Brigid Brophy observes features comparable to her practice of parody in the baroque genre: “Baroque is an open, sometimes an explosive embrace of contradictions, intellectual and of feeling. Ambiguity and puns are its raw material merely. Its essence is the ambivalence, in full deep psychoanalytic import, of emotions. It is a pair of giant curly brackets that clip together things irreconcilable” . Ambivalence and ambiguity... are... defined as the main components of the baroque aesthetics by Brophy....  

"Experimenting with classical material, playing with various styles and art forms jarringly superimposed, and testing the limits of reproducing a norm that degenerates in the text, in order to fashion a literary and linguistic baroque monster. Such a writing process, which quite literally places planting bombs within classical structures at the core of artistic creation and deprives its readers of the comfort of traditional storytelling, may lead to aporia. However, it also encourages readers to adopt new reading strategies, embracing instability, openness and inventiveness...

"In Brophy’s description of baroque paintings, “[t]he elements of the composition are convulsed as though by an explosion, the designer no longer seeks to balance one against another in a simulacrum of heavenly or geometric harmony; instead, he arrests and transfixes the explosion at the very point of disintegration”. The entropic motifs of explosion and disintegration that Brophy defines as key visual elements of the baroque aesthetics emblematize the parodic process at the core of the novel. In In Transit, the classical material of literature is overstated and complicated through various strategies of exaggeration, refiguration and metafiction in order to better display the conventions on which it relies"

- - Justine Gonneaud

Some correspondences here perhaps to Queen and especially Sparks's most outré excesses. 

"dance music is not showbiz"

A bit from an interview with a Uruguay magazine about Energy Flash coming out in a Spanish translation and at the end was I asked about my work-in-progress Shock and Awe:  

Is there any link between glam rock and electronic music?

 Not really, although the great German techno producer Wolfgang Voigt is a huge fan of T. Rex. And there was a fad in electronic dance music the mid-2000s for schaffel, which is a rhythm that is related to the boogie feel of T. Rex and things like “Spirit in the Sky” by Norman Greenbaum. That sort of shuffling, bluesy groove. A lot of mostly German producers were putting out tracks with that feel.

I think the connection between glam and rave is simply this idea of kids going crazy and dancing. A lot of glam was all about rhythm – the desire for a stomping beat after a period in which rock had got very laidback and album-oriented and pensive.  The kids want to boogie. Slade, talking about their rise to popularity, say that everyone was bored with album-rock that you had to sit around listening to.  They say, “the kids just want to rave’ – i.e. have a band like Slade that was high-energy stomping music.

So as much as it was about costumes and make-up and camp, there was also a primal aspect to glam that harked back to rock’n’roll but also looked forward to  rave. It’s a continuum of music to go crazy to.

The DJ is a god?

 Not for me, strangely. I never got into the veneration of deejays. Some of the best deejays I’ve danced to are relatively unknown.  When I think of the best, most incredible dance nights I’ve had, often I don’t remember, or never knew, who the DJ was. It was the resident DJ at some club.

I have seen some amazingly skilled DJs who really add something through their techniques, but generally speaking, deejaying is  about playing good records in a sequence that works, that has highs and lows.  And at the end of the day, the DJ would be nothing without the producers of the music. Who sometimes are DJs, but not always. So if anything, I would say the producer is the god. 

But more than that, the crowd is the star.  I don’t like the thing of everyone dancing but staring in one direction at the stage. I prefer clubs where the DJ is to one side, tucked out of sight, in a little booth. There’s nothing to look at with DJs. It is much better to look at the other dancers, make eye  contact with strangers, or look at the gang of friends you came with. Or just close your eyes and get lost in music. Dance music is not showbiz.

[of course what I am forgetting here, historically, is disco, where there very much is an overlap between glam and dance music, at least in terms of fabulousness and dressing up. Also an overlap between showbiz / show tunes and disco.  Also EDM at that very moment was becoming all about spectacle and hi-tech display, even costumes with Deadmaus etc. Still in terms of my preferences it's a valid statement]